Republicans’ Moment of Choosing

T he United States is on a collision course with reality. Our skyrocketing national debt and the impending insolvency of Medicare and Social Security are just a few of the crises on the horizon. Washington, D.C., is ill equipped to address these problems, however. The political culture, captivated by social media’s instant gratification, almost exclusively pursues short-term victories, ignoring long-term problems.

Difficult problems require serious solutions, of course, but they also require a willingness to tell hard truths. And neither party in Washington is willing to tell the truth to the American people these days.

Democrats, for their part, have spent decades promoting falsehoods about the consequences of our spending policies, expanding the role of the federal government and about the fragile state of Social Security and Medicare. They are committed to big spending — not to the truth.

Meanwhile, Washington Republicans have been too busy rewriting history to be bothered with tackling our nation’s problems.

A growing number of Republican politicians are eroding their own credibility, and simultaneously undermining the entire GOP brand, by continuing to breathe life into the lies surrounding the 2020 election. In 2023, the Republican machine refuses to move on from the destructiveness of President Trump’s final months in office. These falsehoods around the 2020 election and its aftermath continue to captivate a very vocal segment of the GOP base and thus animate many Republicans on Capitol Hill.

The lie that the election was stolen is so pervasive among elected officials that it has become almost a litmus test for loyalty to Donald Trump. To even suggest that there is no credible evidence of widespread, outcome-determining election fraud is an act of heresy in today’s Republican Party. Republican politicians have set aside facts in favor of social-media fervor.

A further lie that has become gospel truth within the Republican Party is that the attack on our Capitol building was merely an “unguided tour” and a “mostly peaceful protest.” We continue to hear Republicans work themselves into logical pretzels as they try to explain how there is a difference between the violence and riots in the summer of 2020 of left-wing organizations and the violence perpetrated on January 6.

A related series of lies has been spun in the narrative about the so-called political prisoners who caused the devastation on January 6. Too many Republicans in Washington and right-wing media outlets describe these prisoners as languishing in an “American gulag,” persecuted solely for their political beliefs. It’s a deceptive narrative intended to gin up anger and frustrations among a disenchanted segment of the Republican base.

Contrast where Republicans are today with what happened in 1964. That year, a former Democrat named Ronald Reagan delivered a famous speech to the nation in which he laid out two possible paths. He spoke to Americans like they were adults who could handle hard truths in that “time for choosing.” He told them not what some might have assumed they wanted to hear but, instead, what they needed to hear.

This trend among Republicans is at odds with the enduring principles of our party. The party of Abraham Lincoln is the party of Ronald Reagan, and our movement was fueled by immutable truths about human nature, individual liberty, and economic freedoms. The GOP of today, however, would set aside our foundational self-evident truths about the rule of law and limited government in exchange for self-serving lies.

Republicans cannot initiate a national conversation about existential threats to America’s future without first clearing the air about the lingering political lies. We should start with the simple truth that Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: The GOP can be the political party with integrity and a relentless commitment to telling hard truths, or we can be the political party that gives in to fanciful lies. We simply cannot be both.

Americans are struggling with the consequences of leftist fantasies and falsehoods. They are counting on Republicans to set aside the feel-good deceptions and tell us the hard truths as we work together to correct course.

Republican politicians will first have to set aside yesterday’s lies if they want to embrace solutions and tackle the problems of the future. Does the GOP have the will to do so?